Paid social metrics are where the rubber meets the road on social media marketing. There are plenty of qualitative arguments for including paid social in your digital marketing strategy, but ultimately, its success must be measured and quantified. Content is the art; analytics are the science.

Social media can be a crowded place, especially when you’re trying to get your message to the right audience. You’re not only competing against other brands on social media, you’re contending with each network’s ever-changing algorithms that dictate just how much reach your message has.

For instance, there’s legacy loyalty: the brands you grew up with, the ones your family has trusted, are brands you’re likely to remain connected to as an adult and pass on as a household name for the next generation.

There’s habitual loyalty, like always stopping in at the same coffee place before work simply because it’s on your way and has a drive-through window. If a new business opened up with slightly better prices, better coffee, or a shorter wait at the window, you could be tempted away from your mainstay.

And at the far end of the spectrum, there are the brands that court a strong following of niche customers who are not only loyal, but consistently and personally engaged, even advocating for their favorite products out of their own enthusiastic interest.

This is the third part in Mason’s series on search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and tactics for ranking on results pages and driving traffic to your site.

SEO has evolved far beyond a reliance on simple keywords, but the written content on your site, as well as the language hidden behind the scenes in the code, retain a great deal of influence on search engine algorithms. Here are the factors that make your content easy to digest for search engines so you can rank highly and capture as many clicks as possible.

In the first part of our discussion on SEO, we broke down the anatomy of a search engine results page, the appearance of different kinds of search results, some of the things search engines are and aren’t looking for, and how to begin thinking about implementing SEO into your own site. This installment will focus on defining our keyword phrases (or “thesis”) based on an understanding of the SEO food chain.

Average click-through rates on display ads reflect a digitally savvy public that has learned to ignore or distrust them. Native advertising could prove an effective way of re-engaging that audience.

The last 15 years of Internet history have been a constant push-pull of online advertisers finding new ways to get their message in front of more eyeballs, and those eyeballs glazing over as users learned to ignore, avoid, or even block as many ads as possible. The result has been dubbed “banner blindness.”

Social sharing platforms are a rich source of data and insights for brands, illuminating their audiences’ preferences, behaviors, attitudes, and interests to better inform the brand’s digital strategy. But there’s a layer of activity happening below the surface, unmeasured, that has been described as ‘dark social.’

Search engines act as a portal to the rest of the Internet – all 4 billion pages (and counting) of it. Getting found amid the crowd requires a careful blend of art and science commonly known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

In this guide, I intend to introduce you to what it is we’re talking about when we talk about SEO, and some of the things search engines are and aren’t looking for on each page of your website.